Hopkin's Amazing Echoes

What is poetry? Poets love to discuss this. Which is telling in and of itself. Are painters or photographers or musicians asking--What is painting? what is a photograph? or what is music? Well, maybe.

But poetry is perhaps particularly tricky as an art form to nail down. For poetry is art made of language. As music is made of ordered sound-- and paintings of "ordered" paint....

I was thinking that three specific qualities of poetry.

First--this art made of language means that the language is to be irreducible, unpharaseable... unlike an essay or even a story that you could in some way retell, though probably losing much of the artistry and joy, you can't really retell a poem--it exists in its words--and cannot be separated from them.

Secondly--very related the first--the language becomes a kind of music--the sound is extremely important.

Third--also related, is that poetry contains in the language the unsayable--the magic of metaphor and image and the music of the language and the exact sensuosness of the imagery all combine to touch on things that are simply beyond "saying." -- Like music and dance and the visual arts.

So--having that as an introduction-- look at this poem in two parts by Gerard Manly Hopkins (my favorite poet). If I were unpoetic, which I usually am to an extreme (this is true), I would try to paraphrase this poem--write a little sermonette on it-- it surely has a profound and beautiful message--

but it also is simply a revel of language in itself--and that exists as art alongside and inseparable, in this case, from its message. I'm amazed at all the internal rhymes and the gorgeous sounds of this poem. It's so much fun--while being so amazingly serious, earnest and sincere. And simply more wonderful because both of these qualities are held together--that's why I love Hopkins and poetry.


36. The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo


(Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)


THE LEADEN ECHO

HOW to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?
Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep,
Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there ’s none, there ’s none, O no there ’s none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.


THE GOLDEN ECHO
Spare!
There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
Oné. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

cheating

This is blog-cheating, I'm sure. But Jacky directed me to this sweet blog by a poet, photographer and follower of Christ in London--and I enjoyed browsing it and thought others might as well.

http://conjuringsunlight.blogspot.com/

poetry class

I'm taking this poetry class-- and I thought that it would be a wonderful way for me to discipline myself and actually write poetry. I thought I would learn a lot more about writing poetry. I thought --

I think I thought I had a different life than the one I have. I think I thought I could have four or five simultaneous lives--and in one of them I could be the uber-slacker who writes blogs instead of doing her work, in another I could be a superstar poetry student who gets up at the crack of down and writes beautiful verse and in another I could be a half-way decent mother and a home economist/home maker/ cook, maid and candlestick maker...

But-- I am just all three of these things in sort of the same boring way i always was--with a lot of not so great poems being created right now.

Gotta go write one of those.

jenny

A nativity poem

Ok, this is sort of goofy--but I just encountered this poem that I loved-- and it's about the Nativity--when I was wanting to find Easter poems--

still, I loved it so much I wanted to have a record of it here. My word--I keep rereading it and rereading it and loving it more and more right now. I guess that's my prayer-- that the boy I love and that I too (and as many as want this) would have the grace to work and work on this question--"What is the world?"--and maybe to find, little by little... the "answered" experience written here...

(it's probably another illegal post. I don't know if this releases me from any guilt to say this. but i thought I would try).


Nativity
Li-Young Lee


In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
One more song, then you go to sleep.
How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night's darling?
Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,
this night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches,
just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,
each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.

The Same Valved Heart

Here's another Easter poem-- this one contemporary--by John Updike. I found it on this website (http://www.edow.org/spirituality/updike.html) which reprinted it by permission. I, however, do not have that same permission. -- no time to comment now, but I found it very helpful at challenging the softened, safe view our culture has tried to make of the resurrection (when the culture doesn't ignore or reject it outright).




Seven Stanzas at Easter
By John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.


Telephone Poles and Other Poems © 1961 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Inc.

Easter

As a girl, Easter was always my favorite holiday. Finally I could feel again the sunshine and warmer air on skin that had been so long stuffed in sweaters and heavy coats, hats, mittens, scarves. Finally we could see more green grass than dirty snow and mud.

My mom almost always made the three sisters new flowery dresses (This now is absolutely astounding to me... !) She would be finishing the hems and we would be finding the last of the pins as we drove into church. (I can't imagine how exhausted she must have been.) We had new shiny black patent-leather shoes to snappily dance around in that day as we twirled in our new dresses and bonnets and ribbons. The earth and all of us in it felt lovely and pretty again.

And church was a pagent that day-- a huge show of smoke machines billowing smoke in front of a empty tomb, the deep bass music thundering through our bones, the orchestra and choir and that massive organ all pulling out all the stops.

Then we drove through the countryside to my grandparents farm and had an Easter egg hunt with our older cousins--outside! One of the first spring days we could comfortably play outside again--and in our prettiest dresses at that! And then we all ate that wonderful country feast-- the kind that leaves you helplessly exhausted, satistfied, delighted-- ham and grandma's perfect mashed potatoes and her beautiful pickled red-beet eggs, (and all the other pickled things) and new peas in cream and angel food cake iced with strawberry ice cream and I'm sure there was pie and her homemade balogna and on and on--food that I suppose I will eat again only after the Resurrection, when she can cook for me again.

I still love Easter--even though there is no way to completely recapture that beauty and joy that I experienced in every detail as a little girl--I try. I still dress myself and my son in the best clothes I can find, make my humble and meager approximation of Grandma's feast (pickled red-beet eggs and angel-food cake iced with strawberry ice-cream of course), I still revel in the energy and joy at the church service, and delight in the flowers and beauty of the creation this time of year.

And the truth is, that though I now spend my winters in California and spring comes right around Ash Wednesday here (as far as I can tell)--I am old enough to have a little better idea of what winters we can experience in our hearts. And though I haven't tasted much of death--I have tasted a little bit--and I think I know a little bit of the taste of the relentlessness of time and the hopelessness of my own striving against time and death and my own sin.

These days, I don't want so much of the pretty clothes at Easter as I want the hope that the story of this beautiful and awful world can come out right. I say I believe this, and I do. But I also see that it takes a certain "work" to enter in to this belief. Similar to all the work my mom and Grandmother and our church did to make Easter so special for us as children, I could give myself more fully to the work of recognizing and claiming Easter's hope in my life.

In his book, Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright suggested that if we spend forty days weeding the garden for Lent, we could give that much energy to the blooming and fruiting of that garden during Eastertide. Easter historically was a 50 day season, he reminds us, and for Christians, it defines our existence--the way we view history, this universe, and our own lives within its framework. So he says,

"In particular, if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought ot be a time to take things up..... Christian holiness was never meant to be a merely negative. OF course you have to weed the garden from time to time....that's Lent. ... Easter is a time to sow new seed and to plant out a few cuttings."

He suggests that we add something during this time that is self-giving and expanding to us--even if we can only do it for this season.

I love the idea--cause it sounds a lot more fun to me than the giving-up and weeding stuff. I love this idea--but I don't know what exactly to do--what should it look like. I'm no good at the fasting/ weeding-- and people have been teaching me about that for a few years now. So what about this planting??? What about, as Wendell Berry called it "practicing resurrection." How do I do that? I imagine there would be acts of service and worship involved. I imagine joining with God's creative works of justice and of beauty and goodness in this world.

Still, I'm very weak and unformed--so, just as I only gave up a few cups of coffee this Lent, I'm only planning a little experiment this Eastertide.

I thought I would take some time during this season to celebrate Easter on this blog--I wanted to post a poem --at least weekly.

So here's the first offering--for Easter-- by John Donne--- This is absolutely beautiful. May it sing to you!

HOLY SONNETS.X.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so ;

For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,

And better than thy stroke ; why swell'st thou then ?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And Death shall be no more ; Death, thou shalt die.

church quote

I am reading a fascinating book by Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, that explores the seperate and connected stories of four Catholic writers-Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton and Walter Percy--in the first half of the 20th century. As I understand it, his thesis is that although they are mostly interpreted and understood and read as individuals -- they are better understood in connection and community with one another, as four individuals who both separately and as friends were engaged almost violent pilgrimage towards making their experience of religion enfleshed in the work they did as writers. (I could be way off on this thesis, since I am a chronically lazy reader and I've only read about a tenth of the book.)

Right now I want to remember this quote-- Elie is discussing Day's first return to the church as a socialist writer and dissaffected young wild woman in New York-- "...what she will seek in the Church, and find in the Church, is what each of them [the other three writers] will seek and find there: a place of pilgrimage, a home and a destination, where city and world meet, where the self encounters the other, where personal experience and the testimony of the ages can be reconciled."

This seems so meaty and wonderful and profound-- this is getting close to a deep enough picture of the church that it almost sounds right. This is a rigorous and beautiful enough description to sound like the truth to me.

I so often get extraordinarily critical of church--mostly because I tend to be contemptous of that which I'm closest too, and it's easier to criticize than engaging in thoughtful and compassionate and honest assessment of what really is going on from a sociological standpoint in this kind of an organization.... But as critical and contemptuous as I am, I am also completely enmeshed in the church. So that's kind of messy. Either I'm enmeshed because I am deluded and using it to fulfill unhealthy tendencies and dependencies in my psyche (and certainly, some of that--more than I know-- is true), or my critical eye is completely arrogant, self-deceived and unfounded contempt (and there's huge truth to this)...

But if I really believe the church is the agent of Life and Grace -- the meeting point between God and all of society--then I believe it is the best, most sensible place for all of my secular friends.

And I can't maintain this mixture of arrogant, stand-offish contempt and unhealthy, infantile dependency and expect my friends to be attracted to that. ...

But this view of the church as summarized by Elie seems close enough to the truth to be of service. I need to continually re-orient my vision so that I no longer entertain the thought of the church as some limp, weak, fantasy-ridden and non-intellectual hide-out for goofy people.

And here is this beautiful, fully-orbed, entirely healthy and robust viewpoint --
"a place of pilgrimage, a home and destination.... where the self encounters the other, where personal testimony and the testimony of the ages can be reconciled...."

As I said, this just sounds wonderfully right, true and good to me. This to me sounds like perhaps this is a part of what God intended and intends-- (I could be wrong, I'd like to understand more).

How grateful I am that these words came to me at this point in my life, when I had at least a tiny bit of an opening to hear them.

I am praying for my friends to come to know the church in this way. I pray I can come to know it in this way.